Sid Sijbrandij: How I Founded GitLab; Remote Work vs In-Person; CEO Coaches | 20VC

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Sid, this is such a joy to do. It's been so long since our last discussion. I was trying to think. It's like three or four years. I mean, I was young when we last spoke. But thank you so much for joining me again today, Sid.

Yeah, it's a pleasure. It feels on one hand like yesterday, and on the other hand, so much has happened since. So thanks-

I mean-

... for having me back.

Not at all, but so much has happened. But I, I do want to start, and for those that missed our last episode, you know, GitLab today, public company, incredible success story. Would love to just provide some context and go back to the beginning. What was that founding moment and how did it all start? In a very succinct two to three minutes.

Yeah. It started when I saw, uh, GitLab, which was created by my co-founder Dmitri. Um, he started it because he wanted to be... have a better way of collaborating at work. And he thought it made so much sense to make that open source, and I thought so too. So GitLab is a DevOps platform, which means you can do anything from planning what you're gonna build software-wise to building it, testing it, making it secure, rolling it out, monitoring it, and improving it. And he thought that made so much sense to collaborate, and in the first year, 300 people joined. Today, we have hundreds of people joining every month to make it better. GitLab is being used by millions of people. This deserves more than just an open source project where everyone is just working for the love of it. This needs full-time people, and today GitLab is over 1,500 people.

I mean, it, it's incredible to see and also kind of incredible to see the different stories actually of the employees. You know, I know many of your team members and seeing them talk about bluntly how they live, which is what we're gonna come on to next, which is, you know, you've always been a remote first company, many, many years ahead of everyone else who's now doing it. And so I want to hone in here a little bit, and I actually spoke to Darren, your head of remote before the show, and he said, "First of all," you know, a lot of people ask, "Well, how do you do it?" Ask instead why, because as I said, it was a very contrarian thing that you did many years ago. So Darren asked bluntly, "It seems you're wired pretty differently with remote being the best solution inherently to you. What shaped this? Was it conviction? Was it personal experiences? Why did you always feel it was right?"

We started off as a remote company. Um, I had... I hired people, but well, the first person I hired was in... Uh, I was in the Netherlands, and the first person was Martin in Serbia. And then we hired Dmitri in Ukraine, and it, it kept going like that. And then even if I hired Dutch people, they, they would come to my house and we would co-work for a few days, and then they would just work from wherever they were. So it organically evolved like that. And then people were skeptical. So we said, "Look, if it... if it stops scaling, we'll stop doing it." But in fact, remote works better the bigger you are. Like if you're seven people, it's probably better to be in a room together if that's practical. If you're 1,500 people, what's the... what's the advantage? You can't be in the same room anymore. You can hardly be in the same building. So remote scales a lot better and because people were skeptical of it, we invested a lot in the things you need to do to be remote. Every company during the pandemic discovered, "Hey, we can work remote." But what they are not intentional about is facilitating informal communication, because that takes more time and effort. It takes a lot less time and effort and money than having an office building. But you still need to be very intentional about that.